The bus thumped, then pitched forward and something cracked beneath it, bringing everything to a straining, air-brake stop. There was no visibility through the side windows: not only was it nighttime, but it was also raining in heavy gushes and torrents. You couldn’t see—but you knew—that on either side of the bus and the narrow, two-lane road we were traveling along was rainforest, dense and wet and alive.
“What cracked?” I asked Anna, who was now standing, leaning toward the front of the bus to see through the driver’s window.
“There’s a bridge in front of us. It looks wooden,” she said. Soon, everyone on the bus was talking—confirming that we had arrived at a bridge that didn’t look stable, yelling out advice to the bus driver, making dire predictions of what would happen should we cross.
Our bus had already made two detours due to fallen trees and washed-out roads. If we couldn’t get through here to get back to San José, we’d probably have to return to Cahuita, or at least to the nearest town and spend the night.
We lurched again and once more we heard a loud crack. The bus stopped. Someone screamed. Anna sat down.
I was paralyzed, mouth full of bitter saliva. Of course, I thought, this is how it ends. This is the headline of that small blurb you glance at on the last column of the third page of the World section in the newspaper: “Costa Rica Bus Crash Kills 38.” This is the moment the bridge will break and the bus will fall in to the river and those who don’t die on impact will drown as the bus fills with murky water. This is my death. I am surer of this than I have been of anything in my 21 years. Why have I never been afraid, never thought that something like this could happen to me? Why did I never fully take into account the laws of physics and the perversity of chance to foresee some gruesome end like this? Of course! It’s so logical!
“Turn back,” a little voice in me said, piercing through my fatalism. “Turn back!” I screamed in my head to the bus driver who was going to kill us all.
Five minutes previously I had been listening to Anna tell a story about her ex-boyfriend buying a matador outfit in Spain—her looped, bird-call Swedish-accented vowels transforming into laughter as she described how ridiculous he was. A few hours before that we had been at a beachside restaurant, saying goodbye to new friends we had made that weekend full of reggae and black-sand beaches, full of sunbathing, beer, dancing.
Anna was a tall, blonde Swedish girl I shared a host-family with in San José. She had a subversive and conspiratorial laugh that invited you in on the joke, making you feel proud and lucky to be her friend. It was the first thing you noticed after her beauty, and her sharp observational humor felt unexpected—incongruous to that bright, gold coin of a face and large, blue eyes. In the months that I knew her, I eventually started to suspect (not literally, not out-loud, but in my imagination’s eye) that she was something quite rare and not fully human: part mischievous elf from an antique children’s book, part good witch.
Anna took my hand in hers and gave it a squeeze.
“At least we know how to swim,” she said.
I imagined how I must have looked to her at that moment—my eyes squeezed shut, tight line of mouth, grimly frozen in my seat—so I croaked out a chuckle. I couldn’t let on that I was busy digesting the idea of our violent deaths, entertaining Dread and Terror like honored guests, imagining my poor parents at my funeral, when she could still manage dark humor to comfort a friend.
The bus started in reverse and for a light-as-air second I thought we were going to turn around, but then we lurched forward with a burst and crack, crunch we were speeding across that old wooden bridge.
I imagined the river below, wild and deep, overpowering the rain-loosened banks.
We made it across and the bus sped along again on solid ground. Some smart aleck up front shouted “Otra vez!” (“Let’s do it again!”). I opened my eyes to Anna’s straight teeth, wide lips, and, of course, laughter.
Just posting a little thing I wrote in my memoir class. I used to scoff at memoir writing but a writer/teacher I admire, Leslie Kirk Campbell, made a very good point: where else do you get your material? Even if you radically change it, morph it, shape it, take one word, one line of it and make it into poetry, novels or short fiction--where else are you getting that raw, visceral, I was *there* emotion and description?
I also miss Anna, who I've hopelessly lost touch with. If you try to do a Facebook search on her name, you'll just get page after page of gorgeous Swedes.
